Re: ‘We’re not a political organization,’ Beilock tells matriculating students
“We won’t rob other people of that ability to express their views,” Beilock assures incoming first years, unless you are organizing for ICE Off Campus, urging trustees to divest from Israel’s genocide of Palestinians or questioning why Shabazz, the center for African inquiry and Black residential life, has been underfunded to the point of almost disrepair.
The Beilock administration’s theatrical pursuit of dialogue obscures the everyday policies and suspensions that jeopardize the well-being of students. It’s only been two months since the College suspended the Black Alumni at Dartmouth’s email rights for sending a message of support for Palestine solidarity organizers and striking student workers. The same striking student workers who are the reason undergraduate advisors now have paid training and dining workers have a $22 base wage among other crucial workplace protections and benefits.
Beilock would rather maintain the status quo than invest in improving the material conditions of Dartmouth’s most vulnerable students. That work, instead, has historically fallen upon radical student-led organizations. Dartmouth’s status quo prioritizes trustees like Eileen Donahoe ’81, who, in her roles as an American foreign policy official, destabilized sovereign nations like Libya in 2011. It should, instead, prioritize alumni like Eileen Cave ’76, an artist, public school teacher and author of the 1974 Institutional Racism and Student Life at Dartmouth.
As a former first-generation, low-income freshman from the underfunded northwestern Virginia public school system, I began working for Dartmouth Dining for $10 per hour, received my first winter coat from the First Generation office and earned my first regular stipend from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. I sat through presentations on “restorative justice” led by former US military missile operators, negotiated for campus minimum wage increases with administrators earning six figures and reasoned with former Provost David Kotz ’86 about the racist origins of the SAT as Safety and Security officers encircled Collis Common ground.
Student organizers won a livable $16.25 campus minimum wage, dignified working conditions and resources like the Free Market through “political organizations” — not by appealing to, but confronting, the soulless corporatists of the administration.
Hosaena Tilahun is a member of the Class of 2025, former vice chair of the Student Worker Collective, former chief editor of the Dartmouth Radical, and current Ph.D. Candidate in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Letters to the Editor represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
